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Sunday, 1 December 2013

The Bolshevik Attack on the Russian Orthodox Church

The first part of the following selection, thought slightly edited, was excised from the chapter, "The Fanatical Spirit of the Revolution" in That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden (Encompass Editions, 2013) for reasons of space. The last two paragraphs comment on the irony of the contemporary relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Putin regime.

"The Bolshevik"

During this confused and murky time of bloodletting
during the Civil War (1918-1920), the Russian Orthodox Church became a fulcrum
about which many of the contending factions and bystanders moved. The fear of the Whites
and Cossacks, that the Bolsheviks were determined to destroy the Church,
was not unfounded. Atheism had always resided in the panoply of Bolshevik
ideology. As early as 1913, Lenin reviled any expression of religion as “the
most dangerous foulness, the most shameful ‘infection.’” After the October
Revolution, the Party oscillated between waging a battle of ideas and employing
political repression. By creating a League of the Godless and through
periodicals published during the 1920s, the Bolsheviks hoped that persuasion
and propaganda would wean the people away from Christianity, Judaismand
Islam in their Central Asia territory, which they considered residues of the
superstitious atavistic past, and replace it with the power of scientific
explanation. Believing that science rather than religion could win hearts and
minds on the issue of immortality, Soviet biologists in the spirit of Dr.
Frankenstein sought ways to halt the aging process by “revitalizing” human
organs and isolating “biochemical elements that would prevent human
decomposition.”

During the Civil War, however, the Reds resorted to
wholesale violence in the desecration of churches and the mutilation and
execution of thousands of Orthodox priests. In August 1920, Lenin agreed to a
plan for mass hangings of rich peasants, priests and landowners with the
perpetrators disguised as Greens which would absolve the Bolsheviks of
responsibility and allow them to blame the Greens later on. Greens were rural
groups who united deserters from both sides to fight Red and White armies
partly because they felt no ideological allegiance, but also because they
objected to the extortion demands and treatment of the peasantry when either
encroached on their territory.

After the Civil War, Lenin intensified the war
against the Church when he used the famine as a pretext to plunder its wealth
and destroy its influence. Although the Church had actively joined in the
relief campaign by selling some of its non-consecrated valuables so that
foodstuffs could be purchased abroad, Lenin ordered that it include in the sale
its consecrated valuables, such as religious icons. When the Church resisted,
he branded it an enemy of the people even though the Patriarch offered to raise
the equivalency through the sale of other Church property. Lenin was not
interested in co-opting the Church but in destroying it with “the most savage
and merciless energy.” When he ordered local soviets (councils) to retrieve the
valuables purportedly to assist the famine victims, armed bands gutted the
churches of their iconography. Angry crowds defending their churches prompted
Lenin to issue a secret polemic: “the more members of the reactionary
bourgeoisie and clergy we shoot the better.” His order to “crush its resistance
with such brutality that [the Black Hundred clergy who were supporters of the
Tsar, anti-Semites and xenophobes] will not forget it for decades to come” led
to the execution of an estimated 8000 people during the campaign of 1922 alone.

A Black Hundred Procession, 1907

Lenin, engineering a prototype of the later
Stalinist show trials, authorized the judicial execution of priests and
bishops. He defended the Bolshevik all-out assault upon the Orthodox Church
because it with its “priestly slime” represented a lethal threat to realizing
his own vision of capturing the hearts and minds of the Russian people. Any
indigenous religious alternative to the quasi-religious creed of Bolshevism
needed to be expunged. He decreed that the Bolsheviks were completely justified
in destroying every vestige of religion because “every idea of God, even
flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness…contagion of the most
abominable kind. Millions of sins, filth deeds, acts of violence, and physical
contagion…are far less dangerous.”

Lenin was not only determined to physically
liquidate their enemies, but also to destroy any images important to them
because as long as the icons existed, the spirit represented by that image
remained alive. Similarly the tenacious determination of the Church to maintain
the religious icons was motivated by the need to preserve the spirit embodied in
those images even if priests lost their lives. Later Stalin compulsively
destroyed all images, monuments and literary references, even critical
allusions to his enemies, so that the effect would be that not only did they
not exist: they could never exist because their spirit could never be invoked.

Ironically, after near extermination under Communist
rule, the church and religion are back at the heart of the country’s politics
The
ideology emanating from the Kremlin—and from the Russian Orthodox hierarchy—is
that the liberal opposition’s fight against state corruption and alleged
electoral fraud has been recast into a script of “foreign devils” versus “Holy
Russia.”The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch
Kirill, took to TV to say that “liberalism will lead to legal collapse and then
the Apocalypse.” On another occasion, he called Putin’s rule “a miracle.”Both
the Church and Putin have the full supportofthe
cross-wearing thugs (a modern day version of the Black Hundreds)who
have taken to patrolling the streets of nighttime Moscow, dressed in all-black
clothing emblazoned with skulls and crosses determined to crush every
manifestation of liberalism which they associate with prostitution, drugs and Satanists.

Putin meets with members of the Russian Orthodox Church

The 2011 Pussy Riot trial, in which three female
activists were given two-year sentences for performing a “blasphemous” punk
prayer in Moscow’s central cathedral—which asked the “mother of God to rid
Russia of Putin”—was a godsend for the Kremlin as it sought to whip up
nationalist passions. Although condemned in the West, inside
the country, it was used by the radical right to reinforce the idea of a Russia
under attack. “The puppets are having their strings pulled,” wrote a daily newspaper,
speculating the Pussies were following U.S. orders. Russia’s foreign ministry
went so far as to say that Western criticism of the Pussy Riot trial was
evidence that Russia espouses “Christian values” forgotten in the “postmodern
West.” What is currently happening in Putin’s Russia is almost a mirror image—apart
from the degree of violence—that occurred in the early Soviet Union under
Lenin.

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That Line of Darkness: Vol. 2

That Line of Darkness: Vol. 1

About Me

Author of That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War, Encompass Editions (2012) and second volume, That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, Encompass Editions (2013).